On November19, Erdogan launched his aviation to bomb several Kurdish regions in northern Syria, in the provinces of Aleppo and Hasaka, notably against the town of Kobani that was the symbol of the victorious resistance of Kurds against the barbarity of the Islamic State. Since then, the Turkish artillery is pounding the zone in order to prepare a ground offensive.
The aspiring autocrat Erdogan took pretext of the attack that happened in Istanbul on November 13, which he immediately attributed to the Party of Democratic Union (PYD-YPG) and to the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK). These two, which do not have in their habit to organise attacks against civilians, immediately denied any implication. But this hardly matters for Erdogan, who was seeking since long a pretext to intervene again militarily against the PKK and the PYD in Syria. Already on May 26 this year, he announced his intention to send his army to control the whole northern part of Syria across a length of more than 400 km and a width of 30 km, and to drive out the Kurds who reside there. The Turkish army has already intervened against Kurds in Syria in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. In 2019, in close agreement with the United States that withdrew their troops, the Turkish army, backed by its Islamist auxiliaries of the Syrian National Army, launches the offensive and occupies a region of 120 km over 30 around towns of Tall Abyad et Ras al-Ain. Today for Erdogan it is a question of finishing the job and expelling Kurds with the PKK and the PYD from the whole Syrian border with Turkey.
Since the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious imperialist powers of World War I, in particular France and Great Britain, the Kurdish people is divided between Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq, reduced in each country to be only a minority more or less oppressed according to regimes and political circumstances, but never recognised as an oppressed nation having the right to separate and establish its own State. The demand of a single Kurdish State not only is incompatible with the manoeuvres of dominant imperialisms, but it clashes with the bourgeoisies of Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq.
Kurdish nationalism always chose to rest on a State of the zone or on an imperialist power. Thus, the petty bourgeois Party of Democratic Union (PYD) of Syria passed agreements with the dictator Bashar al Assad and allied itself with the United States, which handed over Iraq to clerical Arab cliques and which just authorised the last military offensive of Turkey. Thus, the bourgeois Democratic Party of Kurdistan (PDK) manages a mini-State in Iraq, supported by Turkey, which leads it sometimes to armed conflict with the PKK. This is a deadlock. No significant fraction of the Turkish, Persian, Iraqi, or Syrian bourgeoisie, ever accepted the right to self-determination of national minorities. Their four States are all responsible for slaughters and exactions of Kurds. And the protection of American as well as Russian imperialisms is illusory. Besides, the western imperialisms allied to Turkey continue to consider the PKK as a terrorist organisation, while they rested on its armed branch in Syria, the YPG, to fight the Islamic State. Thus, it is manifestly with the agreement of the American and Russian governments that Turkish airplanes could without hindrance penetrate the Syrian air space to bomb the Kurdish populations on November 19.
Confronted respectively to a revolutionary situation and an economic crisis, the Islamist governments of Iran and Turkey redouble their attacks against Kurds. In Turkey, Erdogan and the governmental block AKP-MHP make again Kurds scapegoats in order to attempt to maintain themselves in power with the approach of the general elections of June 2023. In Iran, the powerful mass movement against the Islamist dictatorship was born in the Kurdish region, the most oppressed, and it is against it that repression is unleashed without limit, as the demonstrators are there massacred with heavy machine guns by the henchmen of the regime. Moreover, the Iranian army bombed Kurdish positions in the north of Iraq. Therefore, Kurds find themselves today attacked by the Turkish regime and by the Iranian regime, while the Syrian dictator supported by Russia and Iran waits only for a propitious occasion to recover the control of Syrian Kurdistan.
The future of the Kurdish people is not in the search for alliances with one or another imperialist power, or with one or another bourgeois State of the region. The indefeasible right of the Kurdish people to establish its own State can succeed only by resting on the struggle of the Turkish proletariat to get rid of Erdogan, of the Iranian proletariat to drive out the islamist dictatorship, on the establishment of workers’ and farmers’ governments, on the Socialist Federation of Western Asia.
December 3, 2022
International Bureau of the Permanent Revolution Collective
The aspiring autocrat Erdogan took pretext of the attack that happened in Istanbul on November 13, which he immediately attributed to the Party of Democratic Union (PYD-YPG) and to the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK). These two, which do not have in their habit to organise attacks against civilians, immediately denied any implication. But this hardly matters for Erdogan, who was seeking since long a pretext to intervene again militarily against the PKK and the PYD in Syria. Already on May 26 this year, he announced his intention to send his army to control the whole northern part of Syria across a length of more than 400 km and a width of 30 km, and to drive out the Kurds who reside there. The Turkish army has already intervened against Kurds in Syria in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. In 2019, in close agreement with the United States that withdrew their troops, the Turkish army, backed by its Islamist auxiliaries of the Syrian National Army, launches the offensive and occupies a region of 120 km over 30 around towns of Tall Abyad et Ras al-Ain. Today for Erdogan it is a question of finishing the job and expelling Kurds with the PKK and the PYD from the whole Syrian border with Turkey.
Since the dismembering of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious imperialist powers of World War I, in particular France and Great Britain, the Kurdish people is divided between Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq, reduced in each country to be only a minority more or less oppressed according to regimes and political circumstances, but never recognised as an oppressed nation having the right to separate and establish its own State. The demand of a single Kurdish State not only is incompatible with the manoeuvres of dominant imperialisms, but it clashes with the bourgeoisies of Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq.
Kurdish nationalism always chose to rest on a State of the zone or on an imperialist power. Thus, the petty bourgeois Party of Democratic Union (PYD) of Syria passed agreements with the dictator Bashar al Assad and allied itself with the United States, which handed over Iraq to clerical Arab cliques and which just authorised the last military offensive of Turkey. Thus, the bourgeois Democratic Party of Kurdistan (PDK) manages a mini-State in Iraq, supported by Turkey, which leads it sometimes to armed conflict with the PKK. This is a deadlock. No significant fraction of the Turkish, Persian, Iraqi, or Syrian bourgeoisie, ever accepted the right to self-determination of national minorities. Their four States are all responsible for slaughters and exactions of Kurds. And the protection of American as well as Russian imperialisms is illusory. Besides, the western imperialisms allied to Turkey continue to consider the PKK as a terrorist organisation, while they rested on its armed branch in Syria, the YPG, to fight the Islamic State. Thus, it is manifestly with the agreement of the American and Russian governments that Turkish airplanes could without hindrance penetrate the Syrian air space to bomb the Kurdish populations on November 19.
Confronted respectively to a revolutionary situation and an economic crisis, the Islamist governments of Iran and Turkey redouble their attacks against Kurds. In Turkey, Erdogan and the governmental block AKP-MHP make again Kurds scapegoats in order to attempt to maintain themselves in power with the approach of the general elections of June 2023. In Iran, the powerful mass movement against the Islamist dictatorship was born in the Kurdish region, the most oppressed, and it is against it that repression is unleashed without limit, as the demonstrators are there massacred with heavy machine guns by the henchmen of the regime. Moreover, the Iranian army bombed Kurdish positions in the north of Iraq. Therefore, Kurds find themselves today attacked by the Turkish regime and by the Iranian regime, while the Syrian dictator supported by Russia and Iran waits only for a propitious occasion to recover the control of Syrian Kurdistan.
The future of the Kurdish people is not in the search for alliances with one or another imperialist power, or with one or another bourgeois State of the region. The indefeasible right of the Kurdish people to establish its own State can succeed only by resting on the struggle of the Turkish proletariat to get rid of Erdogan, of the Iranian proletariat to drive out the islamist dictatorship, on the establishment of workers’ and farmers’ governments, on the Socialist Federation of Western Asia.
- Workers’ united front in defence of the rights of Kurds!
- Leaders of workers’ organisations, call and organise demonstrations in front of Turkish embassies and consulates for stopping the intervention, the withdrawal of troops, the liberation of prisoners!
- Immediate end of the Turkish military attack, withdrawal of all Turkish troops from Syria!
- Immediate end of repression against the masses in Iranian Kurdistan and in the whole of Iran!
- For the right of Kurds in Turkey, Iran, Syria and Iraq to constitute a single Kurdish State!